Fukushima nuclear disaster

The Fukushima nuclear disaster showed us once again that nuclear reactors are fundamentally dangerous. Not only do they cause significant damage to the environment, the health of populations and to national economies, the heavy financial cost of a meltdown is inevitably borne by the public, not by the companies that designed, built, and operated the plants. None of the world’s 436 nuclear reactors are immune to human errors, natural disasters, or any of the many other serious incidents that could cause a disaster. Millions of people who live near nuclear reactors are at risk.

The lives of hundreds of thousands of people continue to be affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, especially the 160,000 who fled their homes because of radioactive contamination, and continue to live in limbo without fair, just, and timely compensation. They have only a false hope of returning home, yet the Japanese government is eagerly pushing to restart reactors, against the will of its people, and without learning true lessons from Fukushima.

The latest updates

Nuclear waste storage area in Iitate, Fukushima prefecture in Japan (Oct 2017).
Traditional early morning Japanese breakfast, briefing on objectives, equipment check and drive into the beautiful mountainous forests of this region:...

Geneva, 12 October 2017 - Fukushima survivor Ms. Sonoda will testify today on the ongoing human rights abuses of Fukushima victims, and the ever-present risk nuclear power plants pose to the communities that live near them, at the United Nations...

On March 1 1954, on Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, the US military detonated the world’s first lithium-deuteride hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The radiation blew downwind,...

Tokyo, 11 March 2017 - Greenpeace today commemorates the more than 15,000 people who died six years ago in the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, and the tens of thousands of survivors of the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Six years ago, over 15,000 people perished and tens of thousands of people's lives changed forever. Northeastern Japan was hit by a massive earthquake, followed by an enormous tsunami that wiped out coastal towns one after another.

Tokyo, 7 March 2017 – Japan’s policy to resettle residents to heavily contaminated areas in Fukushima is in contravention of Japanese law and multiple international human rights treaties. Greenpeace Japan and Human Rights Now detailed today...